Comments
4 CommentsFrom the Clip Google learns to crawl Flash posted by Scrivs:
Google has been developing a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files of all kinds, from Flash menus, buttons and banners, to self-contained Flash websites. Recently, we've improved the performance of this Flash indexing algorithm by integrating Adobe's Flash Player technology.
I can't tell you how big this is for a lot of people. Right next to accessibility (which I think was fixed greatly by Adobe), SEO was the next biggest reason not to use Flash for anything unless it was the most practical solution. If Google does this properly you might see more and more sites popping up with Flash, which isn't a bad thing, but if webmasters start going crazy with it again we might have the '97 web all over again.
Mike
Written Jul. 1, 2008 / Report /
I think the problem with this lies in how Google crawls the SWFs. If they're just pulling out an abundance of plaintext then it's essentially useless because there's no meaning behind the data. If there's a way to attach semantic meaning to Flash information (when developing the SWF) then it will be useful.
I don't know if there's already a way to do this within Flash... any Flash developers want to chime in?
Scrivs
Written Jul. 1, 2008 / Report /
Good point, but that also depends on the text the developers use. Not sure if there is an alt text solution like we have in HTML images.
dubsar
Written Jul. 7, 2008 / Report /
The publishing options in flash do, currently, give you an option to include all text and links used in the flash as block of commented html code.
So in theory, all they've got to do on the spider/robot side of things is check to see if the page is setup to display flash, and if so, then parse whatever html comments it finds and use that for its entries.
But they're making it sound like they're actually setting up to process the swf remotely, and scan IT for urls and text... If that's the case, I've got the feeling they'll be an whole new rash of "spider/bot spoofing" via hidden and unused pages of flash content...
As a flash developer, this will be interesting to see how it pans out!
Ozone42
Written Jul. 7, 2008 / Report /
This is why I'm looking at flash again. It's kind of been an elephant in the corner both in my mind, lots of potential but I hated using several of the previous versions of it's development environment. This tips the scales to it's potential, so I hope they've caught up with making developing less painful. I know ActionScript 3 has made quite a few big improvements.